We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
This proposal aims to investigate the emotions, affects and sensibilities typical to the erotic novel of the Romanian literature between the World Wars, as revealed when adopting a quantitative viewpoint. By means of a comparative type of approach, the paper addresses both novels that have entered what we call a canonical selection and novels that are considered to belong to minor literature, but which have gained popularity over the years. The main purpose of this research is to reveal, through big data analysis, the successful networks of emotions that have contributed to the value of certain novels or literary formulas, but also the shortcomings of those networks that have failed to provide a functional affective pattern for the erotic narratives. As for the selection process, the paper analyzes the novels of Camil Petrescu, Anton Holban, Gib Mihăescu and Garabet Ibrăileanu, since they each successfully represent their subgenres. By analyzing them with Morettian methods, the research seeks to reveal the inner workings of the “winning” sensibilities, thereby testing the viability of the Romanian critical discourse that has placed these novels on different axiological levels.
More...
At the same time a writer and a videographer, Valérie Mrejen is an artist who explores the stories of self and others. Thus she associates authentic words and narrative inventions, recorded pictures and fabricated images, in order to manufacture, even to interlace the acts or to play their offsets. However, if her first works are taken to the source of autobiographical dialogues or have reappropriated the vocabulary and the methods of communication, in recent years, Valérie Mréjen is more dedicated to video portrait. It is therefore through the memory and introspection, or by the enchanted narrative of a relation to everyday life, that she renews the figures inherent of the small and large stories, and proposes, with delicacy and humor, an experience of the intimate to share with another who is still located in reflexive position. Finally, Valérie Mréjen ask a question that may seem simple and easy, but witch is in reality very complex, because she demands who – from the artist or the people who compose the work as a speech – is the storyteller of the story? If we refrain from arbitrarily answering this question, we have the choice to be able to resolve the problem and the impact of the “vis-à-vis” that we can see.
More...
Christian Boltanski is an internationally renowned French artist. His work lies somewhere between two antinomic artistic trends, minimalism and expressionism. On the one hand, minimalism tends to remove all forms of emotions and subjectivity, on the other hand, expressionism expresses a cry, a suffering that would express itself in Boltanski’s work. Christian Boltanski was born right after the end of the second world war. He did not directly experience one of the most shocking massacres of the twentieth century, but he grew up listening to the stories of his parent's friends who went into hiding, like his father, or managed to return from the camps. Christian Boltanski's childhood was deeply affected by the stories of those who had survived the Shoah, and the paintings he made at the beginning of his artistic activity represented massacres. Nevertheless, the expressionist dimension of Boltanski's work appeared the most when Boltanski started to explore cinematic art with small movies entitled “The Man who coughs” or “How can we cope with him?”. Then, at the end of the 60s, Boltanski moved away from expressionism and turned to an object with geometric shapes industrially manufactured. The biscuit box, the showcase or the drawer, is given a central place in his work. The artist approached this object with minimalist forms from the angle of a rectangular parallelepiped. However, the box also represents a funeral urn whose function is to preserve the traces of a human existence. Thus, the box full of emotions responds to the artist's desire to transmit emotions to the spectators, while allowing him to contain and erase as much as possible the expressionist aspect of his work. This way, Boltanski’s work appears to be the work of both a minimalist and expressionist artist.
More...
While reconstructing the history of the socio-psychological and aesthetic theory of social roles, a thing that is striking is the subtle dialectics between continuities and discontinuities of a highly important theoretical canon, one of the most prolific resources of today's human sciences. When we talk about discontinuities, we mean that the explanatory patterns of the Chicago School, the one that endowed this theory with its contemporary magnitude, have been aesthetically intermediated by the reception of the thought tradition represented by Georg Simmel and Wilhelm Dilthey – a tradition that, at its turn, descended up to the model of the role plurality of the early Romanticism. These connections between the representatives of the Chicago School and German sociology, between Robert E. Park or H.R. Mead and G. Simmel or W. Dilthey have been obliterated in the proper sociological research. The role theory was reimported and reinvented in Europe thanks to Ralf Dahrendorf and Bernard Lahire, inspired by the literary works of Robert Musil, Ernst Mach and Marcel Proust. The paths to conceptual transformation from the incipient aesthetic role theory and up to the sociological theories of role behavior, partly redeemed by sociology, have, however, been “forgotten” by the field of aesthetics, by the theories of fiction or the theory of the novel. Surprisingly so, the new French and German novel of the 1960s and 1970s seems to independently rediscover the initial meanings of the theoretical concepts of “role” and “social play”. The continuity of the theoretical canon considers this scattered redemption of certain theoretical literary ideas, a phenomenon constantly dealt with by the history of ideas. Therefore, the fall of such patterns from thought systems that are rigorously conceptualized in the public discourse and from here, in literature is not always fatal. This paper follows this parallelism between what is happening with the idea of role and identity in human sciences, fiction and literary theory.
More...THE BOUNDARIES OF POSTCOLONIAL STUDIES
The post-1989 transition of East-Central Europe to capitalist democracy has focused much scholarly attention on the political, economic, social, and cultural trajectories of the countries in the former Soviet bloc and on the fostering of new identities within a wider, European or global, context. Yet the ‘transitologists’ attempts to establish transregional comparisons that would tackle the similarities and differences between postcommunist territories and former colonies were met with deflection and silence among the proponents of postcolonial studies. With very few exceptions, Western scholars were rather reluctant to count the USSR among other, mostly European, “modern empires”. Still, the postcolonial sensibility of people in the Soviet sphere – as documented by oral history, sociological investigation, and cultural analyses – is hard to ignore. In the last few years, the postcolonial- postcommunist connection gained momentum in East-Central European studies, as part of the reflective attempts to translate a specific historical and cultural experience into one of the most widespread theoretical idioms in current academia. In doing so, East-Central European scholars interrogate the limits of an increasingly canonical discipline and join in its critical revaluations by measuring colonialism against other systems of domination.
More...
The interest in a contextualizing approach to literature is getting shape over the 1960s as a means of overcoming the dominant textual (and aesthetical) methodology or emphasis, of breaking away “from the formalist and New Critical emphasis on the autonomy of ‘the text itself’ toward a recognition (or a re- recognition) of the relevance of context, whether the latter be defined in terms of historical, cultural, ideological, or psychoanalytic categories.” (Suleiman – Crosman 1980: 5). In this paper I will consider exclusively the dynamics of reception theories between roughly 1970-1990. The reasons for which it seemed necessary to re-open this ‘case’ are twofold: firstly, to my knowledge Romanian literary culture still lacks a detailed introduction to the so-called ‘golden age’ of reception studies, an introduction that would cover both historical and theoretical aspects; secondly, and more important in my view: as we shall see in the final section of this paper, Romanian literary research, by its nature very prone, even obsessed to synchronize itself with Western theory, was not quite eager to absorb reception studies, especially in their German versions. After 1990, missing out certain stages suddenly brought our literary research to other topics of interest, very political ones, as for instance, cultural, gender, or postcolonial studies, etc. I strongly believe that a reassessment of this kind is still useful and necessary.
More...
Literary history as a field is periodically shaken by challenges directed at its orientation, purposefulness or its very constitutive legitimacy. The object of literary history, it is claimed, is contradictory: it attempts to be simultaneously both material – the description and analysis of literature, of texts and their construction – and ideological, i.e. the history of the literature described. Not only is this history a construct, made possible only through an act of selection and interpretation, but it also has to first “create” the entities whose evolution it discusses: authors, trends, literary kinships, cultural environments with both political and artistic components, the emblematic reader of the time (embodying public opinion and various types of success), the part played by translations and foreign literature in this process, etc. It all becomes possible, at least theoretically, if literary history surrenders its traditional presumptuous ambition of “totality” (or, in Wellek’s words, its attempt “to write that which will be both literary and a history”) and accepts its position as “imaginary space”, a creation and proposition put forth by the literary historian, who can then construct it based on a return to the persona of the author – therefore a sort of new biographism.
More...
This article aims to investigate a new scientific interest in literary sociology (i.e.the artistic individuality) through a few critical reflections on some recent works that offer a sociological approach to the genre of literary biography (Pascal Durand on Mallarmé, 2008; Bernard Lahire on Franz Kafka, 2010). Secondly, we propose a closer look at the tradition of biographism in the Romanian literary space, trying to identify the possibilities and limits of the biographical approach, focusing on the particular case of the communist period in Romania.
More...
The recent theory of biography consists mainly in the critique of this type of discourse. Discovering this, we felt encouraged to push through on a path initially chosen under the constraint of several practical difficulties. Our research of two particular cases, that of Eminescu and that of Cioran, have led us to two versions of the biographer’s “crisis”: in the first case, a deficit of information, in the second, an excess thereof. However, considering that “the death of the author” was too readily embraced by some of the more authoritative scholars of literature, we felt entitled to launch a few critical investigations that didn’t have an official support in the traditional conventions of the biographical genre. “Parabiography”, “oneirobiography”, “impossible biography” illustrate the experimental direction that we submit to the attention of those researchers (still) interested in the “life of the author”.
More...
The essay frames a view on the verging condition of “parabiographies” by running the concept through a short theoretical discussion, followed by two case studies from the recent Romanian literary criticism. We chose Ilina Gregori’s books on Mihai Eminescu (2008) and Emil Cioran (2012), either one projected as a species of parabiography. In both examples provided here, the researcher attempts to overcome the shortcomings of biography by testing its ends, i. e. the ‘posture’ and the ‘imposture’: on the one hand, the information crisis – for Eminescu’s sojourn in Berlin, on the other, the information overload – for Cioran’s sojourn in Paris. With the same means, Ilina Gregori deals with both experiences by implying a larger discussion on photography (whether city panoramas or portraits) and biography. But is it really necessary to reinstall the original links between image and text, between the literary portrait and the visual portrait? What Ilina Gregori discovers is, anyway, the long-standing mishap of either one of them: time after time invalidated and contested on grounds of ‘hybridism’, ‘snapshot’ and ‘life’ also meet at the crossroads betwixt art and craft. It goes without saying that, being ‘from here and from elsewhere’ at the same time, the biographer and the photographer share the same dream and, maybe, suffer the same doom.
More...LA POÉSIE ENTRE PSYCHOCRITIQUE ET SOCIOPOÉTIQUE
While it conveys its source's message, (literary) confession also modifies the said source; and, even more, it conveys more than the purported message, as it borrows from the originating source a psychological context deeply marked by the minor and major history he/she transverses. Thus, the most intimate confession allows rather involuntarily the edification a sociological discourse – confessivity has a surprising yet undeniable social nature which explains why concepts designed for the analysis of prose, such as Jérôme Meizoz's posture littéraire, may prove that useful in the analysis of confessional poetry. And, even more suprisingly, this social nature of confessivity works in both ways – that is to say, literary texts intended to have only a social intention and intension also involuntarily confess most intimate details regarding their author's profile. Poetry is therefore a genre of the biographical; and it is my opinion that, in these times when the private and the public undertake a crucial process of mutual re-accomodation, the interest in the both private-public nature of poetry will resuscitate – as some recent sociological studies already confirm. And this also explains why poetry has found its ideal medium in Internet and Facebook, where the relation between private and public is constantly re-negotiated and re-defined.
More...
The first series of “exemplary” biographies from the Romanian literature was published in the second half of the 19th century. On behalf of a nationalist teaching, these writings used to picture lives that were propelled by mere “national desire”. However, since our point here is not to retrieve this sort of “passion” within a nationalist context, we shall try – while holding Max Weber’s theory from The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and especially Judith Schlanger’s ideas on the topic of vocation – to follow its line, all along with a process that might be properly called “democratisation of vocation”, and which actually furrows the whole modernity. In doing that, we shall maintain a threefold perspective on such “inspired” lives: the first is encouraged by reclusion; the second comes with the assumption of a distinct profession; the third develops on the enhancement of Self and on the assumption of its unaltered singularity. Among these three types, we chose to inquire into the specific ways in which “national desire” articulates the coordinates of an “inspired” destiny.
More...QUAND LES ÉCRIVAINS DEVIENNENT PERSONNAGES DE ROMAN
Given as observational material the corpus of fictional texts offered by Sburătorul, the longest running literary circle within the Romanian space, which has functioned in Bucharest between 1919 and 1943 around the critic E. Lovinescu, we propose a reflection on how the writers become characters in the prose of their contemporaries. More specifically, we will take an interest on how the existence within the group – and the shared existential experience undertaken within it – influences the practice of the fictionalization as far as the biographies of the writers themselves are concerned. The Romanian case upon which we stopped proves an instrumentalization of these fictional biographies within the group. The "lives" are of no interest here as exemplary models; the construction doesn’t start from a myth; the means are not those of fictionalized biography. The presence of the writer is reduced to a few stuporous gestures, to several rigid and repetitive body postures, all of which are to be found in the scenography of the literary circle (attitudes of authority, manners of intervening in the discussion, voice quality and so on). Thus the presence of the writers seems to be a mere decoration – illustrations of the myths circulating within the community.
More...
Based on Tzvetan Todorov’s book, La littérature en péril [Literature in Peril] (2007), this study briefly examines the relationship between literary and philosophical reflection today. The anti- metaphysical strand of modern thought has naturally also permeated literary works and criticism, in the sense that the emphasis has shifted from meaning onto structure and from the author onto the reader. The disallowance of biographism ranks among the consequences of the modern cultural paradigms. The return to meaning advocated by the critics of “new criticism”, such as Tzvetan Todorov or the Romanian Eugen Simion, also involves, however, a return of the author, even if merely as a constituent of the text.
More...
The paper analyzes Vladimir Nabokov’s self-construction as an English prose writer in his novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941). Borrowing formal structures from other epic genres, Nabokov reflects upon the relationship between ‘the real’ and its fictional representation. The description of Sebastian Knight’s novels plays an important part in this complex literary game, especially when read against Nabokov’s autobiography and his later career. The main analytical concept is that of writerly posture, as theorized by J. Meizoz (2007). Indirectly represented through both the characters of Sebastian and V., his biographer (who becomes a writer himself), Nabokov’s posture as displayed in the novel is that of an innovative though still misinterpreted exile writer, who further explores and extends the aesthetic stakes of modernism.
More...THE ROLE OF BIOGRAPHICAL FICTIONS
The so-called “objective” method of archival documentation and the no-less-common opposite temptation of reinventing, of fictionalising, as it were, the past are topics debated both in the sphere of literary theory and in that pertaining to the theory of the theatre or the visual arts. Theoretical disputes have brought to the fore several concepts with significant interpretative potential, which can be squared with the current research methods, or may lead to the refinement or revalorisation of the older ones: authorship (“auctoriality”), (inter)subjectivity, theatricality, imagological and identitarian clichés, comparatism, aesthetic distance and distant reading, metafiction, new historical fiction, incarnation, absorption, immersion. These are concepts whose interpretative or “interpreting” ability can always be verified, especially when they do not function independently of each other, but are complementary tools for analysis and aesthetic judgment. The study aims to reconsider the concepts above, the distinctions and complementarities between them, their validity or their entry into crisis, by resorting to the interpretation of two metafictional texts that I consider to be genuine “theoretical objects”, namely two books written by the essayist and novelist Ion Iovan: the biographical essay Mateiu Caragiale. Portretul unui dandy român [Mateiu Caragiale. The Portrait of a Romanian Dandy], 2002 and the biographical-fictional novel Ultimele însemnări ale lui Mateiu Caragiale însoţite de un inedit epistolar, precum şi indexul fiinţelor, lucrurilor şi întâmplărilor în prezentarea lui Ion Iovan [The Last Notes of Mateiu Caragiale Accompanied by an Unpublished Epistolary Novel, as Well as by an Index of Beings, Things and Events in the Presentation of Ion Iovan], 2008.
More...
The purpose of the article is to trace the functional significance of musical codes that make up a peculiar fictional quasireality in constructing the time-space hyperreality of the genre of fantasy. It is also important to determine the specific features of intermedial musical insertions in the metagenre format of Clifford Simak’s prose. Musical allusions and ecphrases, which are characteristic of the writer’s style, are presented as the “anthropologized” images of musical trees, “musical powers”, musical instruments, dances, the music of mechanic composers, inter-galactic festival, musical time machine, etc. The methodology of the investigation under discussion is based on studies of intermediality and theory of reception. The scientific novelty of the article lies in the fact that for the first time in the history of Ukrainian Humanity Studies, the genre of fantasy is identified as a significant fragment of the evolutionary process of the integral genre system. The sequential generating of literary genre formats in the field of Cultural Studies is regarded as an immanent peculiarity of a complicated literary process, which can be revealed only in case a reader possesses a relevant receptive background. An essential marker of genre evolution of science fiction is the prevalence of intermedial insertions, which substantiates the metagenre essence of C. Simak’s fantasy. The research has been carried out with due regard to C. Simak’s literary method, the latter having transgressed from science fiction to fantasy, thus proving that a consecutive change of the genre strategy is possible even within the activities of a single author.
More...